21-year-old MIT dropouts increase $32M at $300M valuation led by Perception

Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to lift a Sequence A so quickly. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which introduced a $3 million seed spherical in January, was rising quick and signing prospects at a gentle clip.

Then, inbound curiosity began rolling in, COO Kocalar instructed TechCrunch.

Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI brokers, ended up fielding a number of time period sheets, finally closing a $32 million Sequence A at a $300 million valuation. The spherical was led by Perception Companions, which took up many of the spherical, with participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 corporations.

Perception has been “wonderful to work with, and we felt they have been the appropriate long-term companion for us,” mentioned the COO.

Delve’s new valuation represents a roughly 10x soar from its earlier spherical. Equally, its buyer base has grown from the 100 corporations it reported again in January to over 500, lots of them fast-growing AI startups like just lately minted AI unicorn Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Circulation.

And whereas the 2-year-old firm, made up of AI researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, has seemingly struck gold through the use of AI to eradicate tons of of hours of guide processes, its story started a lot otherwise.

Kaushik and Kocalar met as classmates throughout their freshman yr at MIT. Each had deep pursuits in AI and well being tech. Kaushik had already scaled a COVID diagnostic system to hundreds of customers in the course of the pandemic. 

In 2023, they started engaged on an AI-powered medical scribe to assist docs deal with affected person documentation. Nevertheless, dealing with delicate healthcare info meant they shortly encountered the expensive and time-consuming world of HIPAA compliance.

As a substitute of continuous with the medical scribe, they began constructing instruments to assist different corporations get HIPAA-compliant sooner and extra affordably. That pivot acquired the crew into Y Combinator final yr and helped them increase their seed spherical from Basic Catalyst, FundersClub, Soma Capital, and others. The founders dropped out throughout their sophomore yr in 2023.

What began with HIPAA shortly expanded. “As our buyer base grew, they began asking for assist with different frameworks: SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, ISO, principally the entire alphabet soup of compliance,” Kocalar narrated.

Compliance paperwork may be needed in every part from launching merchandise to closing enterprise offers. However as an alternative of driving progress, its guide work can develop into a bottleneck.

“Compliance frameworks are standardized. Companies aren’t,” says CEO Kaushik. “That mismatch is why conventional software program breaks down and groups fall again to duct-taped workflows throughout electronic mail, Slack, and shared drives.”

Delve replaces that busywork with AI brokers that run within the background (after integrating with prospects’ instruments) like inside crew members. These brokers gather proof, write reviews, replace audit logs, and observe configuration modifications throughout fragmented methods, automating compliance workflows in actual time.

Kocalar says compliance is simply the wedge into broader back-office operations. Lengthy-term, the AI startup needs to automate a billion hours of different work — finally increasing into adjoining areas like cybersecurity, danger, and inside governance.

Perception Companions’ curiosity displays this roadmap.

“Since compliance touches each a part of how a enterprise runs, from scaling operations to closing offers to constructing buyer belief, modernizing this operate will modernize the complete group,” mentioned Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Perception. “That’s what makes Delve’s method so vital.”

Nonetheless, the startup gained’t be with out competitors. A number of AI corporations are rising with brokers to automate enterprise workflows. As well as, bigger AI labs like OpenAI are releasing general-purpose brokers able to performing complicated duties.

That mentioned, Kocalar says these developments are a validation, not a menace, to Delve’s enterprise. She factors to the corporate’s area depth in distinction to extra general-purpose brokers.

“We’re positioning ourselves to enhance as AI advances and labs roll out extra subtle agentic applied sciences. However what actually units us aside is the deep, domain-specific information we’re constructing into the platform,” she mentioned. “Compliance is all the time shifting as new laws emerge and current ones evolve, with corporations decoding them in numerous methods. That’s the place Delve stands out.”